


Depths of the Mind

by willowsandwonders



Category: Vast Error
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:22:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25655095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowsandwonders/pseuds/willowsandwonders
Summary: Sestro has an episode.
Relationships: Sestro Enthal/Hamifi Hekrix
Comments: 3
Kudos: 20





	Depths of the Mind

Sestro’s been working for...a while, when he realizes his head is starting to hurt. It’s hurting _bad_ and he hunches over like he’s been struck when a spike of pain hits him behind the eyes. The papers on his desk feel very far away. He was working on...working on……he’s not. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anymore. 

Sestro pushes back his desk chair and rises unsteadily to his feet, one hand shooting out to catch himself on his desk when his vision flashes green. A few pens and pencils get knocked to the floor and he flinches at the noise they make clattering against the tile. 

His room. He’s gotta...he’s gotta get out of here, or else someone will come in and people will _know._ They’re not allowed to know that he breaks down like this. It’s a rule. 

There wasn’t even a _reason_ this time, Sestro’s pretty sure. He’s had some...bad ones, over things he can’t think about right now or he’s pretty sure his head will break in two. But today he was just...working? The not-knowing makes him wonder if he’s forgetting something important, and what if something’s _really_ wrong and his pan is just shutting down too fast for him to fix it, and worrying about that makes his head hurt even _worse--_

And then he’s in the hallway, pan stuttering and skipping a few steps. It’s so damn _bright_ with the white walls and white floor and the white lights and he stumbles drunkenly over to the wall so he can lean against it for a second, screw his eyes shut and breathe. A picture frame digs into his shoulder. He ignores it and keeps staggering forward, one hand gripping futilely at his pounding head, eyes glued to his shoes shuffling against the tile. At some point there might be an elevator, but he’s too dizzy to tell for sure.

When he finally stumbles into his block, his eyes are watering with...relief, he thinks. He sinks into his comfy little pod chair that Secily always says is a death trap. It’s dark in here, and he’s surrounded on almost all sides by the cushions of the chair, and _finally_ he can clumsily kick off his shoes, pull his knees to his chest, and rest his spinning head on them. Everything still hurts, but he can handle it now that he has the chair and the dark and the safety of his block.

He needs to call Hamifi. She told him that if one of these happens, and she’s not there, that he needs to call her. The instructions were very simple. He wouldn’t even need to talk into the phone. If he could just hit a few buttons, she would figure out what’s going on by his silence alone. She’s very smart and he loves her. 

Which is exactly why he can’t bother her with this. Remembering stuff is getting...a little tricky, but he knows she’s supposed to be down in the caverns today. Hamifi loves the caverns, loves spending time with all the little wigglers. When she talks about them her eyes get soft and she smiles without noticing she’s doing it. He loves her _so much_ and he can’t take that good thing away from her.

Instead of calling his matesprit, he lets his eyes drift among the little plastic stars on the ceiling. He feels like he’s floating up between them. All the starships his ancestor launched never came back, but that never scared Sestro the way it should’ve. It would be nice, to be nowhere for a while. A distant, fading part of his awareness realizes that that’s what he’s doing right now. He’s so selfish, going away like this when he still has so much to do. He’s gotta... 

Time passes, far away from Sestro.

∞ --- ∞

Then there’s someone in front of him. Sestro _tries_ to force his focus to sharpen, to run through all the important faces and names he knows, so he can figure out who it is that needs him right now. With a clear mind, he could probably name several hundred of the top corporate employees without stopping for breath, every seadweller and jadeblood, every person who works in this building, maybe even this stronghold. 

But he doesn’t have to do that, it turns out. Because he knows, in a blurry glance at one horn tip, at the careful brush of her fingertips, at the long braid that falls forward as she leans down towards him, knocking against his knee. 

Hamifi is here. 

Sestro tries to smile, because it feels like so long since he’s seen her, and also so she won’t worry. He tries, really hard, and passes out instead.

∞ --- ∞

Something is squeezing his arm. Hard. He cracks his eyes open, gaze slip sliding until he distantly recognizes a blood pressure cuff on his arm, then, belatedly, Rodere standing in front of him. She says something that slides right past his distant focus on the situation, then he sees Hamifi nod, lips pursed. 

Hamifi is here! The tiny burst of excitement wears him out, though, and he’s about to snuggle back down into his ‘cupe when someone shines something bright in his eyes. He grumbles, and more words float around the room, and then he’s gone again.

∞ --- ∞

He never really understood why his pan turns on him like this. He unlocked his alchemical potential, he _knows_ that his emanant aspect is Mind, and at the end of the night it feels like a cruel joke that his overloads himself like this. He knows The Executive _has_ to know about it, he always looks at Sestro like he knows so many things he would never tell, but...does this happen to him, too? 

Sestro isn’t sure whether a yes or a no would make him feel better. He isn’t sure about much of anything, most of the time. He knows so many things, and yet nothing he reads ever answers the questions that he has. 

In his more lucid moments, he rises close enough to the surface to eat the food Hamifi brings him, to feel her hand running through his hair. He wishes he could surface all the way. He wishes he could sleep forever. 

Everything is distant and fuzzy, slipping seamlessly between reality and dreams. He’s not in pain anymore, either too deep to feel it or they gave him something to make it go away. Good. Sometimes he feels sopor slime against his skin, or maybe the brush of space and stars around him. 

He feels like he’s on a rocketship, plummeting straight into The Depths. 

∞ --- ∞

Sestro wakes up.

Feeling himself fall into one of these episodes is bad, but coming back out again is worse. He feels like a skulltitan ripped his pan out of his skull, then haphazardly lobbed it back in piece by piece. He has no idea what day it is, what wice it is. All he wants is to curl up again and sleep until the dull ache of his body and mind goes away. 

But he’s lucid, at least for now. The Heir has things to do. 

He pulls himself off the reclining platform he doesn’t remember leaving his ‘cupe to lay down on, shrugging his favorite star-patterned blanket off of his shoulders. His glasses are folded on the table next to him and he paws them over towards himself. When he stretches, his joints make a litany of loud _pops._ If caffeine didn’t send his anxiety through the roof, he’d go find a coffeemaker and chug the entire pot. 

He’s almost to the door when he notices Hamifi. She’s sitting in one of his chairs (a normal one, she always complains that her horns catch on the top of the pod one) and she’s got her phone out. She sends a message with a decisive _tap_ before turning towards him. She looks tired, and his bloodpusher thuds painfully at the sight 

“Sestro.”

“Hm?”

“Where are you going?” 

“I’ve got work to do.” Things are slotting back into place again, in his pan. He’d been reading some old reports from the Renaissance on cloud seeding. The concepts could be applied today to altering the volume, or possibly even the composition of, the acidic rain. He’s not sure why he had an episode in the middle of something as dull as that, but he really does need to--

“You’re in pajamas.” 

He looks down. Yep, he’s in sweatpants and an old, baggy shirt. He’d rather not have photos of that circulating in all the stronghold’s tabloids. Autopilot has him already tugging off his sleep clothes, fishing around his closet with his other hand for proper office attire. He could probably stand to spend some time in the ablution trap first, but he’ll just have to make do with a few extra spritz of cologne. He’ll just ask Hamifi to cancel any of his in-person meetings. Which she’s probably already done, because he’s been out of the office for--

“It was three days,” Hamifi says, because he’s pretty sure she can read his mind sometimes. “You didn’t completely lose consciousness, but didn’t have many lucid periods either.”

“...Good,” he says, even though it’s actually all terrible. “Good” at this point means “not in a coma for two and a half wices.” 

“I was only gone for two days, Sestro.” He very deliberately keeps staring at a stack of folded white shirts, buttoning his shirt with more caution and care than it strictly requires. 

“I don’t even know what caused it this time.” He wipes the smudges off his glasses with the corner of his shirt tail, then steps into a pair of plaid slacks. “I was just working. I don’t remember anything bad happening?” The questioning lilt at the end is unintentional, but. He does need to know. It’s not like him to forget things, especially something that made him spiral into an episode.

“Nothing happened. Quite literally nothing. We looked at the security logs and no one went in or out of your office for forty-eight hours. Including you.”

“I’ve worked that long before.”

“Yes, you have. You’ve done it while taking breaks to eat and drink, to stretch and walk around. You’ve done it when you _had_ to do it, not when you were reading the eighteen speculative scientific reports from the Renaissance that I had to sift through.”

“Oh.” Staring at his shoes while he leans down to tie them makes him realize they could probably go for a polish. Maybe he’ll do that later. 

“Rodere said she would just leave you to die next time you overworked yourself for no reason.”

“And what did you say?”

“I threatened to find a better doctor. And then I agreed with her.” 

“You would leave me to die?” His fingers stutter and drop the tie he was trying to knot. He was just trying to banter with her, make all of this a little less tense, but...he knows that it’s hard on her. He can’t stop feeling like it isn’t fair, that this has to hurt everyone else too, no matter how much Hamifi and Secily reassure him otherwise. Even Rodere, who gives him hell every time he does something stupid, never actually blames him for when his pan shuts him down. 

Hamifi’s arm curls around his shoulders. Her arm is jade-warm against the thin fabric of his dress shirt and he sags back against her. Her other arm curls around his front, pulling him tighter against her, and she rests her chin between his horns. 

“Of course I wouldn’t.” She rubs a few small circles in the back of his shoulder. “I worded that poorly. I just hate to see you hurting like this, and I was trying to express my frustration with you overworking yourself so severely, especially when there weren’t any dire circumstances to justify it.” 

“I’ll do better,” Sestro mumbles, a little more miserably than he was shooting for. She’s had to reassure him like this before. She’ll probably have to every time he does this. Her words make him feel a little better, sure, but…

Hamifi spins him around carefully, hands resting on his shoulders. She’s staring at him very earnestly in the dim light. He swallows hard, but does his best to meet her gaze. 

“What your mind does is not your fault.” She must sense his doubt, because she squeezes his shoulders and says more firmly, “it _isn’t._ All I want from you is to do the best you can to take care of yourself, and to ask for help when you need it. Not to try and control things that can’t be controlled.” 

He leans up and kisses her. It’s the best way he knows how to say _thank you for everything._

“I really do need to go work a bit,” he says as he pulls back, giving her a quick extra kiss on the cheek to hopefully pacify her. “I know you do a good job whenever I’m...away, but you’ve been doing two jobs at once and I’m sure some things have piled up.” 

She frowns. _Shit._

“What you _need_ is to come eat a sunrise snack with me, and then clean up in the ablutions block. _Then_ we’re both going to sleep, for at least six hours, minimum.” Her voice is edging into Business Hamifi mode, and he knows better than to try and negotiate with her about something like this. 

“It’s sunrise?” Is all he says. He feels a bit silly putting on all his office clothes if that’s really the case. Not that he really looks ready for the office, anyway. He still doesn’t have his vest on and his tie is hanging loose and un-knotted around his neck. On top of that his head still feels stuffed full of cotton, his limbs heavy and achy. Dinner, ablutions, and rest with his matesprit sounds _very_ tempting. 

Hamifi offers her hand. Sestro takes it. 

∞∞

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!  
> I'm pretty new to Vast Error, but as far as I know this is the first Sestro-centric fic on ao3, so hopefully I did both him and Hamifi justice o7


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